Tina Hansen: Baton twirler

Updated 10:49 am, Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Tina Hansen was born into a baton-twirling family, the Foehlingers. Her mother owns a Nebraska baton studio. She and her twin sister, Tami, started twirling when they were merely two. All her siblings, including her sister Rachel, took up the sport, save her brother Ryan.

"He's not a twirler," Hansen said. "He's a marathon runner."

Hansen loves and coaches twirling. And it has rewarded her with awards and experiences she wouldn't have otherwise had.

She has twirled in Moscow, for example, and elsewhere across the world. The sport helped her become Miss Nebraska. (It was her talent, of course.) And that, in turn, made her a focus of the MTV reality program True Life.

Competitive baton twirling, if you haven't seen it, is an athletic and physically demanding mix of gymnastics, dance and juggling. The sport is much more popular in the South and West than here in New York, but Hansen, a recent transplant to the Capital Region, wants to one day open an upstate studio.

"I'd like to see if I can bring it into popularity here," she said, noting that she returns often to Nebraska to continue teaching.

"I just really love the students that I coach," she added. "They're almost like family to me."

Hansen and her twin's success in the sport is fueled by tragedy. Her brother, Bobby, died in a car accident at 21, but not before becoming a folk hero, of sorts, at the University of Nebraska, where he was the first male on the university's twirling squad, which performs at Cornhusker football games.

Hansen said the fact that Bobby never won a world championship in the sport motivated her and her sisters to do what he couldn't. Hansen and her sisters were members of the Team USA group that won a world championship in 2009, and they'll return to the event next year.